Welsh Journals

WELSH RURAL COMMUNITY STUDIES: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. GARETH J. LEWIS Gareth J. Lewis 1986: Welsh Rural Community Studies: Retrospect and Prospect. Cambria 13(1) pp. 27 to pp. 40. Part III of Davies, W.K.D. (ed) Human Geography from Wales: Proceedings of the E.G.Bowen Memorial Conference. ISSN 0306-9796. Community studies have long been criticized and out of favour in the social sciences. But a recent revival of interest in the approach has led to claims that some 'new' tradition is being forged. A review of a series of Welsh community studies completed in the 1940s and 50s is used to assess this claim and to discuss prospects for the future. Gareth J. Lewis, Dept. of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester, England. LEI 7RH. This paper is concerned with those empirical investigations of particular places and localities known as community studies. The origin of these studies has been traced back to the early part of this century when a more scientific approach was adopted within social anthropology (Banton 1966). Initially, such local studies were restricted to primitive societies on the premise that the mechanism of societal development could best be understood in what was initially considered to be a relatively simple situation (Evans- Pritchard 1962). More complex modern and industrial societies were not treated to anthropological analysis until much later (Lynd 1929). For example, the first major study in the British Isles was that by Arensberg and Kimball (1940) of a small community in Southern Ireland in 1938. Yet an often underestimated contribution to this literature has been that series of community studies undertaken in rural Wales during the immediate post- war era (Lloyd and Thomason 1963; Owen 1982). According to Frankenberg (1966 p. 45) these studies were the result of the "general leadership provided by three remarkable professors of geography, H.J. Fleure, Daryll Forde and E.G. Bowen." By the early 1960s researchers became increasingly disillusioned with the study of communities because they found the concept impossible to grapple with (Hillery 1955), and the studies themselves too idiosyncratic and subjective (Bell and Newby 1971). Even those who favoured the study of community admitted that to "deal with the effects of such familiar processes as increasing industrialization, geographical mobility, and urbanization" it is